Strib Pages

Once upon a time in the Twin Cities (and maybe your town), alternative weekly newspapers roamed the Earth.  Copies of the Twin Cities Reader, Sweet Potato and others were available for free on college campuses, record stores, newsstands and libraries.  In those pages you could learn about government corruption, alternative lifestyles (usually from a liberal perspective), hard-hitting reviews of movies and restaurants, and the latest band coming to town that for some reason don't get radio airplay.  It was nothing you'd ever find in your typical local daily.

Now it's 2015.  Alternative papers are still around, though they're fewer in number.  Sweet Potato has since become City Pages, which after the demise of other weeklies ended up cornering the local market on alternative journalism.  And Voice Media, which currently owns CP, has chosen to sell it to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. 

The Strib, which was recently purchased by businessman Glen Taylor, has vowed to keep CP editorially independent.  To that end, they're shutting down Vita.mn, an entertainment-based weekly.

It's hard to believe there won't be some tweaking to the point where "alternative" is all but meaningless.  Those hard-hitting articles we talked about?  They'll start resembling those long pieces you usually find in the Sunday newspaper, devoid of any real point of view.  Oh, and the language in the articles should be cleaned up too.

City Pages usually likes to point out the shortcomings of the Star Tribune and the other media in town when it comes to local news coverage.  Any bets on whether that continues?

And we mustn't forget the amount of advertising CP accepts for "gentlemen's clubs", massage parlors, tattoo shops and other businesses not normally found in a daily newspaper intended for general audiences.  Again, how long do you think this is going to last?

You might say this is the beginning of the end for alternative journalism, though some might say the end came a long time ago.  Maybe it's too much to ask in the age of the Internet and declining interest in printed media, but could there possibly be somebody out there willing to provide an alternative to the "alternative"?